I just got home from the midnight showing of the brand-new sure-to-be-blockbuster Iron Man 2. I’m going to attempt to give you my reaction without necessarily giving anything away (because, really, where’s the fun in that?), but you could probably argue that any sort of reaction to the movie could be considered a potential spoiler.

With this in mind, I’m going to try to save my thoughts on the movie until after the jump; however, I can’t just put the jump in here, because then the format of the post will be goofy looking. Skip down the page to the jump if you want. I’m just gonna waste some time until then.

Before I went to the theater tonight, I re-watched the original Iron Man film. Thought you might like to know that. Man, I really like that movie. So good. I especially like the ending. What a great way to OK that’s enough, let’s jump into this. (more…)

Welcome to the latest installment of “Doom and Doomer,” in which members of the Legion take a look at comics on the big screen. Tonight, your participants are Jim Doom and Doom DeLuise, looking at the new Kick-Ass movie, starring Aaron Johnson, Chloe Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Nicolas Cage, based on the comic created by Mark Millar, written and directed for the big screen by Matthew Vaughn.

WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.

DOOM DELUISE: A couple of nights ago, you sent me a text message that read, “Holy crap, Kickass is amazing.” Care to expand on that? What do you think worked so well about this movie?

JIM DOOM: Well, to start with, I think if we’d have had this discussion Saturday night instead of right now, things would be a little different.

But I can’t deny that I loved the movie and more specifically, I loved the experience of watching the movie.

I knew nothing of the source material. I don’t have the grudge against Mark Millar that many seem to have, but I’m no huge fan either. But something co-created by John Romita, Jr. doesn’t exactly inspire me either. So I’d never had even the slightest interest in picking up the books.

Which probably helped me, because I had no idea what was going to happen, and I thought the movie did a fantastic job of staying relatively unpredictable (at least when it needed to be), keeping the adrenaline rush, and using humor to make it all seem so oddly real.

Also, I thought the casting was fantastic. I have no idea who that kid was that played Kick-Ass, but he was really good.

I don’t want to cover everything in my opening statement. What did you think? (more…)

Over the last decade, Chris Claremont’s track record at Marvel has been poor. Heck, since leaving X-Men in 1991, his comic writing in general has been poor. Two words: Sovereign Seven.

So when I heard about X-Men Forever, where-in Claremont is going back and rebooting the X-Men as if nothing had changed since he left way back when. That means no Onslaught, no Marrow, no Bishop, no Bastion, no Fantomex, no Nano-Sentinels. Cable may be many things, but in this version of events, he’s certainly not Nathan Summers. Why? Because a young child roams around by that very name.
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MG Doom recently made a very valid point that it’s hard to wade through the thousands of web comics to find a few gems. But I’ve also covered my love of xkcd here previously.

So, dear readers, you may be wondering “What should I read?” Well, here’s the unqualified opinion of somebody who owns all four issues of X-Men vs. the Micronauts:
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DOOM DeLUISE: So last week, Jim Doom and I watched the newest movie from DC Animation, “Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths.” Big picture, overall, what were your thoughts? Better or worse than previous efforts from DC’s animation department?

JIM DOOM: Big picture, I’d say that I keep hoping for DC to learn from the faults of previous movies, I keep going into these movies waiting for this to be the one I enjoy, and I keep coming away from them hating them for the same reasons.

I feel like we are long past the point of broken-record status on these things, but once again, we’ve got a DC animated movie that thinks you can make a really stupid story mature by adding blood, death and sexual references.

I did feel like the animation was stronger in this one than previous efforts. In other DC animated movies, I kind of felt like they were stuck in the style that began with Batman: the Animated Series and continued on to the Justice League cartoons. I mentioned it as we were watching it, but the animation reminded me a lot of the style of Aeon Flux — much more fluid and lifelike, and less abstracted and simplified. I guess maybe it’s a little counterintuitive to act as if DC is progressing in a way that reminds me of an early ’90s cartoon, but I liked that.

Good animation wasn’t nearly enough to overcome the many many many flaws in this thing though.

DD: Well, y’know Mean Gene, I think you have a point about the animation, though I found it incredibly tiresome that everybody seemed indestructible, including Batman and Owlman. When the physical violence in the movie doesn’t have any sort of lasting implications, it’s just a bunch of punching, kicking, and dust clouds with no real importance.

JD: Yeah, and I think that’s just one of many examples of how these movies are dumbed down far beyond the point of being convincingly mature on any kind of intellectual level. Part of what makes Batman interesting is that he’s just a normal guy. Normal guys don’t have giant stone pillars dropped on them and walk away from it. You take away the normal guy aspect of Batman and he’s just another superhero in a cape.

But that gets at another problem with this movie — absolutely terrible characterization. (more…)

I’m slowly but surely finding my way through the endless stacks of manga.  Takehiko Inoue’s art has been by far the best I have come across in the manga that I have read or seen.  His work is the only manga that strikes me the same way that American style comics with great artists due.  The art by itself could sell his work but thankfully he also happens to be a talented storyteller.  I started reading his popular ongoing Vagabond series, which continues to impress me despite how tiresome it is to that so many manga involve swords in some form or fashion.  I suppose the sword is to manga like what spandex is to superheroes.  You just have to learn to sort of tune it out as it just part of the infrastructure.

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The fourth and final issue of the Beasts of Burden mini series came out this week.  I thought it a good time to look at the title as a whole as Dark Horse plans to collect the mini series and the original shorts that first appeared their horror anthology series into one hardback sometime in 2010.  I’m a long time fan of Jill Thompson’s art work and that was all the incentive I needed to check this out.

Beasts of Burden is about a group of mostly dogs and a few cats that help protect their town, aptly named Burden Hill,  from supernatural forces.  It’s classic horror comics just with talking animals as the good guys and a healthy dose of humor to keep things from being too dire.  One of the strengths I found with the book was the balance of the characters.  Each dog and cat have a distinct personality while taking advantage having them being different breeds so it’s easy to tell them apart.  Jill Thompson’s really shines through here.  It’s easy to see why she won an Eiser for best painter back in 2004 for the first anthology installment of this series.  While I think it’s great that Thompson has found success with her children’s books, I’m very happy to see her working on something that geared for a older audience.   (more…)

I’m finding it interesting how fractured Marvel seems of late from a creative perspective.  The negatives are more obvious especially with Siege bearing down on us, but there are some very clear positives within Marvel as well.  You have to dig a bit but they are there.  With that in mind I thought I would look at three of the books I have enjoyed from Marvel this past week.

X-Factor #200

X-Factor is a tough book to peg.  It unfortunately gets buried in the grab bag like list of X-books, even though it is different from the other books in the X-family.  X-Factor would probably be best described as writer Peter David giving strong character development to lower tiered characters from the X-universe.  Sadly the book has one major weakness that being unreliable and often poor artwork.  I think that makes the book a tough sell since readers have to look past rather bland art to see the strength of the book which is Peter David’s writing.  Issue #200 is a good jumping on point for new or lapsed readers.  It sets a new storyline involving the Fantastic Four where Valeria and Franklin Richards hire out X-Factor to find their missing mother Sue. (more…)

In a effort to get away from the usual frustrations of mainstream Marvel and DC, I turned to Image once again.  This week saw the release of the Olympus trade collecting the four issues mini series, and much like Chew the book did not disappoint.  Olympus centers around brothers Castor and Pollux.  They act as sort of agents on earth for the gods if anything escapes from Hades.  The story starts out with the brothers tracking down an escapee and sending him back to Hades but they forget to close the portal in time and much a bigger problem gets out.

Knowing that this was only a four issue mini series I expected the story would feel rushed as it had to pack quite a bit into a limited number of pages.  The pacing did not prove to be an issue as the story flowed at a nice pace, especially in the last half.  It’s a quick read but it doesn’t feel like a rush job.  It helps that the book plays off of Greek mythology, so in essence it has Greek continuity to act as back story.  Christian Ward’s art is rather unique.  The line work looks like the rough pencils many artists use to lay out a story before the proper art is done.  This could have easily made the art a mess that was hard to read.   (more…)

Captain America Reborn sure is bad.